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Unfounded Part 2
Thanks to everyone who read my first post. I actually wrote the whole thing in just about 4 hours, start to finish, in a single sitting, because this has all been bottled up inside of me for a very long time and I guess it finally just all came pouring out at once. I think that--am actually genuinely afraid that--as crazy as everything in that post was, though, it was just the foundation for something much bigger and weirder. Something that covers stretches of time I couldn't possibly have imagined, and has consequences that may have already spread beyond my little hometown. I'm telling you this up front, because that first post was easy. It was just an absolutely insane, impossible childhood memory, and the equally impossible night years later. I wasn't trying to put anything together, to connect any dots. The dots connected themselves. I just happened to be there. But this next part? This next part is work. I've decided I am going to go back to my hometown, to my childhood home, and confront my parents about that day when I was 9, when I first saw the columns. I still have so many questions about that day, questions that have lingered just below my conscious thoughts every day since then, and despite seeming to get a few answers that night last Thanksgiving, most of what I discovered, or at least think I discovered, has honestly just opened up more questions, both in general and about that day from my childhood. I could just call them and ask, but my parents were so evasive that day, and have been so silent about it in the years since, that I genuinely don't trust them to give me full honest answers, and it will be a lot easier to tell if they're withholding information if I'm there, in person, looking them in the eyes. I need to know what my parents know, especially what my dad knows. I need to know what he did that day, why he was wearing that absolutely bizarre outfit that was almost otherworldly in its inability to be described in any rational way. I need to know what was in that special suitcase he took to work with him. I need to know what that work consisted of. And after what I found deep underground last Thanksgiving, the bones, the obvious site of not just one but several sacrifices--maybe even mass sacrifices--at the end of that platform or alter or whatever it was, I need to know if my father was involved in the disappearances of those children that day when I was 9, and the subsequent disappearance last year when the columns returned. Which brings me to another uncomfortable thing I need to confront. I need to understand more about whatever the fuck it is that is under my town. Being down there, it was so clear at the time that whatever it was was alive, somehow, as impossible as that seems. Right now, far away from it, in the daylight, with no gigantic oppressive garden of towering concrete columns blocking out the sun, the notion of that seems absolutely ludicrous. I have no idea what it was, but I've never heard of anything like that. Not in actual biology, or even the crypto-zoology I've been looking into ever since. There are barely even any parallels in fiction that would seem to fit whatever the fuck that was down all those countless steps, deep in the depths of the Earth. Maybe some Lovecraft, but even then there isn't much in the way of similarities, as far as I can tell at least. I'm so desperate I'm looking into mythology from around the world for anything, any basis that I can work from. But I'm getting off track. The point is, that chamber, that giant impossible hollow somewhere god knows how deep below my town, was being lit from below. Or I think it was being lit. Like I said in the post, whatever was coming through those cracks in the adobe floor allowed me to see, but I can't be sure if it was actually light. I can't be sure about pretty much anything that happened down there, including how much time passed while I was there. When I got back topside, it was clear that it had been maybe a few hours, max. But down there, it felt different. Time felt very different, and I have vague memories, almost just a collection of still images and indistinct feelings, that suggest I was down there much, much longer than that. Point is, I don't feel like I can really trust my memories of that experience. But the one thing I'm most confident of is that when I shined my flashlight down on that horrifically tall, unwieldy tower of bones that moved from the relatively recent at the top to what appeared to be positively ancient near the bottom, my light struck that adobe floor. And I'm more positive about this than anything else I saw or experienced down there: the contact of that light with the floor is what threw it's lazy, organically rhythmic undulations into the tense spasm that sent columns of adobe earth crashing through the concrete ceiling of the chamber, and eventually produced the columns above ground that could be seen looming over every inch of town the next day. I did that. Whatever that thing down there was, whatever those columns were, I woke them up. And that's the most troubling thing of all. I know I'm responsible for them appearing the day after Thanksgiving last year. And it doesn't take a genius to make the connection that both times the columns have appeared, children in the town have disappeared, and with them, the columns. The columns were gone within a day of me stirring them, as was, according to the girl's aunt, 7 year old Tiffany Carter. Tiffany's mom has refused to talk to the press or any family outside of those who live in town with her, and has denied the girl is missing. The local police investigated and made the determination that Tiffany's mother was correct, and that the report of her disappearance was "unfounded". But her aunt has been persistent. She has talked to anyone who will listen, told them that no one in the family has seen the girl for almost a year now, and that the mother and the police are lying. I don't know if that's true. But I saw enough that night last year to know something very wrong, very evil, and very secretive is going on there, enough so that it at least seems somewhat plausible that Tiffany's aunt could be correct. And if that's the case, if this child disappeared, and if the disappearance had something to do with the columns, and if I'm the one who caused the columns to rise over the town in the first place that day, then I am, at least to some extent, responsible for whatever may have happened to Tiffany Carter. And the thought of that kills me. Even so, I've lived silently with that guilt for almost a year now. But it finally became too much, and I wrote that first post, to at least begin to get the story out there. Selfishly, to try to soothe my guilty conscience. But the process of going back through those memories, some of which I had repressed for a very long time, awoke a deep desire with me to find answers. And some of you expressed a similar desire. Which is good, because I'm determined to get them. For Tiffany, for all of you, and, selfishly again, for myself. I haven't have the opportunity to go back home yet, but in the meantime I've been following up on another line of inquiry that I'd actually started before posting that first entry. A friend of mine from college, Jeremy, was a history major, and eventually went on to get a PhD and now teaches it at a school a few hours away from my town. He knows the area and its history pretty well, and incidentally, is one of the friends who initially dragged me on their urban explorations of abandoned places that eventually led me to so brazenly break in to the old municipal building, he's partially responsible for planting the seed that eventually sprouted into that night last Thanksgiving. I got in touch with him about a week ago, reminisced a little bit about college, about the abandoned places we explored, and I explicitly told him that one of my favorite things about the excursions was discovering the histories of the places we explored, piecing together their stories and gaining a new understanding of them. I told him I'd explored a few places in my hometown, although I left out what I found in the basement of the municipal building, and everything below that, and hinted that I would really appreciate knowing more about the history of my town and the land it was settled on, the sorts of odd and strange things that wouldn't be in the town museum or a generic book about the area. The sorts of things his research experience and knowledge of what kinds of sources produce interesting results might turn up. And so, the morning I made that first post, he got back to me, left me a voicemail saying he'd found something weird in the records of an indigenous tribe who lived near the area that the town rests on today. I thought that was an oddly specific thing to stress, particularly in a short voicemail: that the tribe explicitly did NOT live where my town is today, only nearby. So I called him. I actually recorded the call to make sure I didn't miss anything, and so I didn't have to take notes and could instead be free to focus on whatever he had to tell me. I've gone back and transcribed the conversation here, beginning at the relevant point. I did redact every use of my town's name, because this is obviously a dangerous situation. People have gone missing and I don't want to do anything that might encourage others to put themselves or anyone else in danger. I'm already caught in this, I don't want to drag anyone else down with me. -- Me: So in your message you said you'd found something weird in some native records? Jeremy: I mean, I wouldn't call them records. The people who eventually settled REDACTED didn't exactly get along well with the indigenous peoples in the area. Me: Didn't get along well? Like, how? Jeremy: They were fundamentalists. Violent fundamentalists. They did some bad things to people they found who weren't white and Christian. Like, massacre-level bad. Me: Fuck. That bad? Jeremy: Yeah, like bizarre mass lynchings, things I've never heard of before. Me: But not in the area where they settled? Jeremy: Yeah, that actually seems to be why they chose that location for the town, because no tribes or other groups lived there, or even very close to there. They definitely felt that the place was more holy or, I think the word was "intact" than other places, and I assume that's because there weren't other people carrying out what they considered to be blasphemy on the land. I don't know for sure though, the records on the reasons for the town being founded there aren't super clear. What I found was actually from a group that lived about 200 miles southwest of where REDACTED stands today, which, I mean, is a pretty long ways away, especially for the mid 1800's. But it seems like the closest group recorded in any historical documents. Me: Okay, but wait, why aren't they records? Jeremy: What I found on REDACTED? Me: Yeah. Jeremy: I just mean its not, like, the formal work of a historian or even an anthropologist or sociologist. It's some oral histories, interviews, really, taken by some missionaries who were trying to convert the tribe at the time, and their church preserved the interviews. It's not vetted and there's really nothing to prove that the interviews even happened, let alone that their contents are true, other than the existence of the interview transcripts themselves. Hell, it could have been completely invented by the missionaries, either as proof that they were doing their jobs when they were busy getting drunk in some bar hundreds of miles away from where they were supposed to be, or even manufactured as proof that the tribe was in dire need of the Church's guidance, possibly in the hopes of receiving more manpower or funding to continue their work. These things aren't even online. I had to get my university library to borrow the documents from the church to even get my hands on them. Don't even ask how long it took to pinpoint this one document from this one tiny ass church as a possible lead on this. Me: So it could be complete bullshit. Jeremy: Complete. Total bullshit. Especially considering I can't find anything to substantiate what the person being interviewed says. Like, at all. Nothing. Me: Then why even bother with it. Jeremy: Because it's weird as fuck--even weirder than the details about the lynchings your founders did--and even if its not true, it's a pretty wild story about the land you grew up on. pause then laughs Because it reminds me of breaking into places with you and Rachel and Eric and making up our own stories for why the abandoned places were like that. Even if they weren't true, even if we were completely off base, they were still fun. Me: Laughs Oh, so nostalgia, then. Jeremy: Laughs Yeah, nostalgia, I guess. Me: Okay, so what is it? Jeremy: Well, the missionary talked a group of the tribe's elders, trying to get a sense of where the tribe fit in among the other Great Plains tribes. So they asked the elders to recount the tribe's history. It was all pretty standard, their people had been on that land--I mean, the land they were on at the time of the interview, not the land where REDACTED is today, because, to be clear, records show they never got closer than a couple hundred miles to that area--so on that land for thousands of years, living as most people indigenous to the area did, small communities that hunted, fished, gathered crops. Then, around 700 years ago, the missionaries figured it would have been around 1300 CE, this loose collection of communities came together to create a singular government, becoming the tribe as the missionaries found it. Me: Sounds normal. Jeremy: Yeah, so far. But the tribe was threatened by a larger tribe to their west. That's actually what prompted the communities to join together in the first place. Even together, though, they were still much smaller, and were fearful that they could be, for lack of a better word, conquered by this neighboring tribe to the west. So they reached out to more far-flung communities, inviting them into their tribe. Basically trying to bolster their numbers. Here's where the weird starts though. According to the elders, a woman and her three children showed up one day. They said they'd come from the northeast. From a large community that was located just about where REDACTED is today. Me: I thought you said there weren't any records of any people living there before REDACTED was founded? You said that's why the settlers chose that land in the first place. Jeremy: That's the thing. There isn't. Nothing other than this one interview by some missionaries. This is the only mention of it anywhere I can find. Which is why I think this could be complete bullshit. There's never only one singular, deeply esoteric record of something like a large indigenous community that supposedly lived someplace for thousands of years. Me: Thousands of years? Jeremy: Yeah, the woman said her people had lived on that land, where Redacted is today, for thousands of years. That their ancestors trace their history there back to the beginning of the world. Me: Is that normal? That sort of mythology about an indigenous group? Jeremy: Yes and no. Some groups do make claims like that, others say they descended from people who came from far away. It's honestly not a big deal. Me: Okay, so what IS the big deal? Jeremy: The woman said she left, that she made this couple HUNDRED mile journey, on foot, with three young children, because her people were going to kill her kids. Me: So is THAT-- Jeremy: Normal? No. Not at all. These people weren't--I fucking hate this word--"savages." They're nothing like most of the depictions you see in movies and shit. Hell, most of their communities and tribes were more civilized than ours are today. So no, that's not normal at all. Me: Did she say why they were going to kill her kids? Jeremy: Yeah, and that gets to the second reason I think this is probably completely fabricated. She told the tribe that her community had, for lack of a better word, a "king". I'd say "chief" but that doesn't really mean the same thing as what she's talking about. She's not talking about a political leader, or someone the people looked up to and followed. She's talking about more of an absolute dictator. You do exactly what the king says, or you die. The way she talks about the king is absolutely without precedent for indigenous groups on the continent at that time. It just doesn't fit with anything that we know. The actual word she used most closely translates to "foundation," but in context that word doesn't make sense. "King" is as close as I can get. Me: You translated "foundation" to mean "king". Jeremy: Yeah, I know, it's weird. Me: So that's the weird thing? That they had this "foundation" "king" thing? Jeremy: It's only weird for the area. There aren't any records of any other tribes having a leader like that around that time. But that's not the weird part I'm talking about. It's only weird to me; I knew you wouldn't care. There's more, and this is where you might get more interested. She doesn't describe the king, the "foundation", in any significant detail, but she makes it clear that they didn't look at it as a person. She talks about it like it's a, um, a thing. A massive, MASSIVE thing. It controls everything and everyone that lives where it is. She said the king stretched for an incredible distance. Easily the size of REDACTED, maybe even a lot bigger. And that it towered over everything. Like, LITERALLY towered. She said it stretched from below the earth up to the heavens. Me: ...the, um, heavens? Jeremy: Yeah, she said different parts of it were under the earth, but it also had all these parts that came up and kept going until you couldn't even see the tops of them anymore. That it did that to remind the people how powerful it was, that it was above them. And so, naturally, the people did what anyone would have done back then: they worshiped it as a god. They credited it with everything good and bad that happened to them. She said it even showed them things. Showed them everything, whatever that means. Visions, I guess. Eventually, they didn't even really seem to draw a distinction between whatever the thing was and the actual fucking land they lived on. Eventually they seemed to consider them one in the same. Which is how the sacrificing started. Me: Um. Jeremy: She said when their crops and hunts were good, they believed it was due to this thing's benevolence. To this thing being happy with them. And when things were bad, they believed the thing was pissed with them. Well, one year, a disease broke out in the group, and a number of children died. They buried their bodies as they always did, and the next spring, she said crops that hadn't even been planted grew up all around the place where they'd buried the kids. And that's how they made the connection, that dead kids equaled happy god. So they continued. Whenever they needed a good harvest, a particularly successful hunt, they sacrificed a child. And they got the good harvest, they had the successful hunt. Whether by luck--if that's the word for it--or by something else, their belief that this thing controlled their lives, and that it wanted dead kids kept getting reinforced. But eventually a drought struck, and the crops died, and the animals went elsewhere looking for water, and the group got desperate. So they started killing all of the children. Just a mass slaughter of their own kids. This woman said she fled hundreds of miles on foot with her three children to spare their lives. Me: Holy shit. Jeremy: I know. Her story sounds ridiculous, if she was even real. Because when the tribe heard about the community she came from, they decided to go and try to convince them to join their new nation. The woman begged them not to, but they went anyway. A couple elders and several strong men with a lifetime of experience tracking and living in the wilds of the plains left on a journey to find the community. According to what the elders told the missionaries, the party never returned. A second party was sent out a couple seasons later, looking for the original one, and they did eventually come back, although without the first group. When they came back, they reported finding, in the approximate area the woman had described, a gigantic, flattened piece of ground, covered completely in some sort of hard clay--from the description it SOUNDS like maybe adobe clay--stretching so far you couldn't see where it stopped. Me: Adobe? Jeremy: Yeah, it's a clay that-- Me: I know what it is. Keep going. Jeremy: So anyway, this is it. This is the crazy. The party that returned said that there were giant pillars or columns of adobe sticking out of the ground, in a pattern. Some sort of regular arrangement. They said the pillars were massive, immeasurable, and stretched to the heavens above. Me: That's-- Jeremy: There's more. They said they found people. Or bodies, rather. They couldn't tell how many there were, if it was the first party, or people who had been living on the land. Me: They couldn't recognize their own people? Jeremy: No, because of the way the bodies were. They described the bodies as being somehow impaled on the sides of the pillars, several feet off the ground. All in the same position, together and down, arms outstretched, like they'd been crucified to the columns. But that's not even the weird part. Me: What the fuck. Jeremy: They said the faces on the bodies were... I don't know... MISSING. That where their faces should be, there were just dark black holes. Me: Like their faces had been dug out of their heads? Jeremy: No, not exactly. They specifically said they couldn't see what you'd normally see inside a head. That when they looked in the holes, they saw something else. Me: What? Jeremy: Stars. The dark night sky. Fucking SPACE. A few even said they saw constellations they recognized. And that the space they saw inside each person's, um, I guess you could say "face", was different. Like it was a different perspective, or view, of space. Me: Jesus. Jeremy: Yeah, I've never heard of anything like that before. The party said that they got lost looking into the faces, that they lost time, days maybe, staring into those maws where faces used to be. They were transfixed by them, thought they were a view into heaven. But they were also terrified. Once they were able to pull themselves away, they got out of their as fast as they could. They said as they were leaving, they saw a hole in the ground, a large rectangular hole, like a doorway on the floor, with steps leading down, but none of them dared go in. They kept going and the few that could still speak reported what they'd seen. According to the elders, none of that second party were ever the same. Several took their own lives in the days that followed their return. The elders said that after that, they never sent another group in that direction. Me: That sounds, um, really crazy. Jeremy: I mean, at least that's what the missionaries said in their notes about the interview. Me: Do you, um... do you believe it? Jeremy: Like I said, there are a lot of reasons not to, including that the scene described near the end doesn't even sound possible. Me: Yeah, but do you, like, personally think it could be true? Jeremy: I don't know. History is filled with weird shit that any rational person would swear couldn't possibly be true, except that it was. We know it was because we have several accounts from separate, reliable sources. We don't have that here. All we have is the weird shit and one very questionable source, citing another source that may not even exist. Me: Yeah. It's... it does sound impossible, doesn't it. Jeremy: It sounds like a horror movie. Like some really fucked up horror movie. Not the kind of thing that ever happens. There's so much impossible shit in it. I believe the woman, if she was real, fled because she was worried about her children. I don't know if I believe that a community was sacrificing all its kids to some sort of... I don't know what. And I can't possibly believe that there was this place covered as far as you could see with adobe. First of all because that's fucking impossible, and second of all because that sort of building material wasn't really used by the Great Plains tribes. They were more into using wood, animal skins, that sort of thing. Adobe requires a certain soil composition, which wasn't available in the region. So the concept of having a massive amount of it covering an area is just impossible. Also, who would put it there, and why? And obviously the pillar-column things stretching to heaven and the holes in the people's heads where you could see space, that's all insane. Maybe it's metaphor, maybe the party thought they saw something they didn't see, maybe what they really saw is lost in the translation, maybe they made it all up, maybe the missionaries made it all up. I don't fucking know. There are so many ways that craziness could have ended up in the document I read, but the one way I KNOW it didn't get there is by actually happening. Me: Just out of curiosity, which church were the missionaries from? Who kept the copy of their interview notes? Jeremy: The missionaries were from a church in St. Louis, Protestant, and originally, their records were kept there, but they were eventually moved to a different church, which is actually how I found out. After I couldn't find much of interest in the normal places, I turned to some more unorthodox sources. Churches sometimes have pretty interesting records from the town going all the way back to their founding. It was the First Church of REDACTED. I pulled it up on Google Maps, I think it's downtown, on the same block as the old municipal building you said your dad worked at. And it was perfect because the church is actual as old as the town itself, both founded in 1845. So it worked out that-- Me: So all of this information was in town? Why was it moved there? Jeremy: I don't know for sure, but it looks like Matthias Grunder was a regular at the church in St. Louis and-- Me: Wait, Matthias Grunder, my town's founder? Jeremy: Yeah, that guy. I guess he brought some documents from the St. Louis Church when he went out and founded Redacted. He actually founded that First Church, too, so he probably used the documents to help with that. Then he just kept them in the archive there. Me: So the guy who eventually settled on that land knew about that interview? Jeremy: I mean, maybe. He took a lot of stuff with him, I don't know how much he knew himself. But he would have had access to it. Me: You don't think it played a role in choosing that location for his settlement, do you? Jeremy: Nah, one crazy story? I doubt it. If anything, maybe the part about how there were no native people in the area might have attracted him. Once he had his second kid, born blind, just like his first, he seemed to get tired of massacring indigenous populations, and I think he probably just wanted to get away from all that and try to find some peace. Not that he deserved it, but that's probably what he was seeking. -- There was more to the conversation after that, but it's not worth transcribing here. From that point on, it felt like I'd been punched in the stomach, like the wind had been knocked out of me. Everything he told me, everything that he thought sounded ridiculous and fake, sounded far too real to me. I've spent the last 10 months trying to convince myself that my childhood memories--even my memories from Thanksgiving last year--were somehow wrong. That I had been incredibly mistaken, confused dreams with reality, that what I thought was real was just the symptom of some mental illness. Because that would honestly be preferable. I would the truth be that I was sick than that my town has been quietly murdering children for decades, maybe more than a century. But what Jeremy had unearthed for me was proof that it wasn't. That I was completely, painfully, hopelessly sane. Jesus, that a century of child murder might only be a tiny sliver of the actual magnitude! And my god, that the church where this information was kept was as old as the town itself! Most of the founders were probably members. If they were following in the footsteps of that lost tribe, the interview document would have given them an instruction manual, a step by step how-to guide. It's how they knew. How they knew what to do, how they put the system in place that is evidently still functioning to day. But why? Why settle there, knowing the price they would have to pay? Surely there were other places they could have chosen, other parcels of land that could have worked for their needs. What exactly WERE their needs? I need to know more about Matthias Grunder. There's definitely something there. But those questions will have to wait. For now, I have to deal with something much more personal, much more painful: everything I thought I remembered DID actually happen. Tiffany Carter WAS actually missing. Probably dead. And speaking of which, when I was 9 and the columns appeared, six children disappeared before the columns receded. And the woman's story from the interview seemed to cite several examples of killing multiple kids to satisfy whatever the fuck that thing is. So was this time different? Was only one child necessary? Or is Tiffany just the only victim whose name somehow escaped my town's event horizon? How many children did I endanger that night under the old municipal building? I don't think I can sleep. --- Addendum: This has been a lot for me. It was hard to revisit that conversation, to transcribe it, to go through the horror of realizing how massive this thing I've found myself involved in is. And it took me a couple days to get down, written out. And in that time, something really strange happened. I received a package this afternoon, no return address. It was small, just a little bigger than a brick, and heavy as one. I opened it to find a single piece of concrete, obviously broken off of some larger structure. And on it, in perfect type, as though the concrete was poured into a mold to cast it, were the following words: I DREAMED OF YOU I have no idea what that means, or who sent it, but I searched the tracking number on the shipping label, and the origin post is my hometown. I have no idea what this means, but I'm scared. I'm really fucking scared. Because it seems that while I've been looking into this whole thing, whatever it is, someone--or something--has been looking back into me. Category:Reddit Pastas